The power of ‘voluntary’ sustainable endeavours

As you can see, this Havas Media Lab blog is now home to some of the broader work we are doing around sustainability and how that translates from a corporate level to a brand level. We were present at the SBi08 last week and we’ll be adding some thoughts on that later today. Umair’s and my work overlap quite a bit in this area for one reason; sustainability is increasingly being seen as a driver for innovation and business re-invention. Not the only one, granted, but certainly an important one, especially as businesses now look to re-define their boundaries of influence and rebuild stocks of that most precious of all resources - trust.   I am in the process of back-dating some of our entries from other blogs within this site and those will appear over the next few days. In the meantime, heres a link to AdMap UK where we have just published a paper on the merits of brands not losing sight of the flip-side of what many call Eco-Efficiency; what we call Eco-Elasticity. We’ll add the paper as a pdf here very soon.  G 

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Social Innovation Camp

Last week, I was one of the judges at Social Innovation Camp. SICamp was a lot of fun - and it’s an awesome idea - a living example of what we’ve been researching and recommending for the last several years: new DNA. The idea behind SICamp is simple: to, over the course of weekend, seed groundbreaking new ideas for social change. These ideas might go on to become businesses, social enterprises, or non-profits. But the point is that they don’t play by yesterday’s rules of organization: they break them.

 

And that’s just one level- the what to seed level. At a deeper level, SICamp breaks the rules of how to seed stuff, too - over the course of a weekend, participants self-select, self-organize, and collaborate to develop real-world ideas. Every evil corporation should run a camp like this once a month - because the power of self-organization is awesome to behold, and diametrically opposed to the tightly controlled and controlling algorithm that 20th century institutions ran.

I think SICamp rocks because it helps us come up with new rules for new kinds of institutions - it’s how we can reconceive and reinvent yesterday’s tired DNA, especially in the increasingly toxic venture industry. I spoke a bit about that in an interview at SICamp with Jemima Kiss from the Guardian - you can hear my thoughts here (about 20 mins in).

 

For a more detailed summary, Lee Bryant from Headshift, one of my fellow judges, wrote a post discussing all the finalists and the eventual winner.   

The upshot is simple: SICamp is the kind of event that is necessary to help us reconceive a better kind of economy - one where a new generation of revolutionaries can get together, cast aside the constraints of 20th century thinking, and begin answering the tremendous challenges facing us in the 21st century. How cool is that? Very.

Congrats to everyone who participated - and especially Anna, Paul, Christian, Katherine, and the rest of the SICamp team for putting together such a cool event.  

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Livestream From Sustainable Brands International

Here’s a livestream from the Sustainable Brands International 2008 conference in Miami, where Guy Champniss, our Global Director of Business Insights, will be discussing our research into sustainability, climate change, and shifting consumer preferences. Guy will be speaking at 19:50 CET — Enjoy!!

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